Introduction NVMe SSDs are the enthusiast topic of interest right now. The storage industry has become affordable in the SSD market, but is trending towards NVMe as a replacement. This is faster and can reach GB/s rather than MB/s. It does this by bypassing the ACHI protocol and pushes the boundaries of what basic SSDs can’t. I will be looking at a Zotac implementation of NVMe using an HHHL PCIe card at 480GB. This is Zotac’s first consumer NVMe drive, and claims speeds of up to 2600 MB/s over PCIe gen 3. Let’s see if this drive can push the limit of NVMe and stand out among its competitors. The specifications are as follows: Form Factor PCIE Add-in-Card Interface NVME 1.2 PCIE Gen 3 x 4 Flash Type MLC DRAM Cache 512MB DDR3 Capacity 480GB Sequential Read Up to 2,600 MB/s Sequential Write Up to 1,300 MB/s Random Read Random Write Power Consumption Read: 5.57W Write: 7.27W Idle: 0.5W Thickness Supported OS Windows, Mac OS, Linux MTBF (hours) 2,000,000 Accessories Bundled low-profile bracket

Introduction USB storage is one of those somewhat mundane things that we use all the time without giving it much thought: Backups, sneaker-net transfers, boot devices for installing new OS’s, transportable cinema, you name it. Chances are, you have a number of these devices scattered about your desk, home or office. In all honesty, these devices have utterly revolutionized portable storage, replacing Floppy Disks of all types, Zip Drives, write-able CD’s and in many cases write-able DVD’s and Blu-Ray disks. While USB 1 and USB 2 versions of these devices may have wowed us for a brief instant in time, it wasn’t until the advent of USB 3 that external USB Storage came into its own. The theoretical transfer rates of USB 3 (5 Gb/s or 640 MB/s) coupled to NAND flash with its high read and write speeds make USB external storage as fast or faster than most spinning disks and some internal SSDs and the small size of these devices coupled with their low power requirements make them astonishingly capable. Booting from a floppy or CD/DVD is pretty painful. Booting from a USB 3 thumb drive is (in some cases) all but indistinguishable from booting from an internal HDD or SSD. So, it’s with a certain amount of excitement that I find myself in possession of not one, but two cool storage devices from EMTEC. The first is a 256 GB USB 3.0 Flash drive packaged in the traditional “Thumb Drive” format. The second is a 256 GB USB 3.0 Portable SSD. Yes, ...

Introduction If you don’t own an SSD by now, you really should. Nothing is quite as satisfying as seeing Windows boot up in mere seconds, versus the half a minute or more it sometimes takes with traditional hard disk drives. Solid State used to be pretty pricey, but it seems like those prices are dropping every day making good drives much easier for any consumer to get their hands on. CRUCIAL is a company that may get overlooked when it comes to some of the other juggernauts in the industry. However, they seem to have a good range of drives that perform decently while being at a reasonable price. Today, we’ll see how the MX300 with 750GB of capacity measures up, but before we do, here’s a quick section from CRUCIAL’s site that tell us a little bit about them. Expertise is Crucial We live and breathe memory and storage, but it’s not just a work thing. We build our own rigs, geek out over new technology, and game as soon as we’re off the clock. We’re constantly learning, and we like jumping on the forums to answer your questions just as much as we enjoy walking you through the install process so you don’t have to figure it out on your own. Compatibility is Crucial With more than 100,000 products on the market, memory and storage used to be notoriously hard to buy. But when you use our System Scanner or Crucial Advisor tool, years of compatibility research are at your fingertips. In just three questions, we’ll learn enough about your system t...

Introduction Our site name implies that we deal with nothing other than overclocking. Obviously it would be impractical to only cover overclocking news and reviews, but it means that overclocking is the driving force behind almost everything we do with computers. Even though I understand that there are some good reasons, I’ve noticed that it doesn’t feel like overclocking has been the mainstay of our site recently. It’s time to change that! I’m not saying we’re going to quit covering gaming mice (You have no idea!), but I want to start steering PureOC back to what we’ve always loved about building computers. I’ve seen a lot of guides online for finding just the right components in a computer build. I’ve never found one that satisfies the overclocker in me! Rather than trying to complain about everyone else’s decisions, I figured it was time we bring our own guides for building a PC with overclocking in mind. We’re going to start by listing the best components you need for a great mid-range computer, but I plan to expand this with a high-end and budget range guide as well in the future. Each category will have one selection, but we might throw in an honorable mention if we feel like it was a particularly close contest. With mid-range, we’re trying to stay under $1000 while trying to deliver a full quality 1080p experience. I think we can do that fairly well right now. How did we come to these decisions? Obv...

Introduction It doesn’t get old. The IBM 350 Disk File from the 1950s had fifty 24-inch platters to give it a total capacity of 3.75 megabytes. Today, we’re looking at a storage solution the size of my pinkie fingernail that can store 256 GB! Storage has certainly come a long way and micro SD cards never cease to amaze me with how much they cram into such a tiny package. What also amazes me is how well SAMSUNG has been doing lately. Even though they may not be the cheapest, I’ve found their EVO line of SSDs to be a go to choice when I want the best balance of cost, performance, capacity and dependability. I imagine that the Micro SD EVO+ with a crazy 256GB capacity will bring us much of the same as it’s SSD predecessors. We’ll look into that soon, but before we do, here’s a statement from SAMSUNG explaining what motivates their product design. For over 70 years, Samsung has been dedicated to making a better world through diverse businesses that today span advanced technology, semiconductors, skyscraper and plant construction, petrochemicals, fashion, medicine, finance, hotels, and more. Our flagship company, Samsung Electronics, leads the global market in high-tech electronics manufacturing and digital media. Through innovative, reliable products and services, talented people, a responsible approach to business and global citizenship, and collaboration with our partners and customers, Samsung is taking the world in imaginative new dire...

Introduction Over the course of the last few weeks, a couple of anonymous brown boxes showed up on my doorstep. Festooned with foreign post marks, they set the household atwitter with speculation as to what might be contained within. I’m not sure the rest of the residents appreciated the contents quite as much as I, but for my part, I was ecstatic to open them and find both an XPG SX930 “Gaming SSD” and the more mainstream Premier SP550 from ADATA nestled among the packing material. Before we move on, let’s think about that a bit. Not so very long ago in late 2009, I purchased my first SSD. A 128GB Patriot Torqx SSD that I paid $369 for. Performance was rated at a paltry 260MB/s sequential read and 180MB/s sequential write. TRIM wasn’t implemented on that particular Indilinx Barefoot controller (I’m not sure it was even invented yet), and it ran on a SATA II interface (1.5GBps) of which it was at no risk of saturating. There were no categories in SSD’s. No “Gaming”, “Performance”, “Premium” or any other label. SSD was a self contained category all on its own. (For a bit of historic perspective, you can read Jake’s review of the Patriot Torqx 128GB SSD here). Today, our SATA based SSD’s saturate a 6 Gbps SATA III bus, and an ADATA Premier SP550 costs a mere $79 on Newegg for just about twice the capacity and more than double the performance of my now Vintage Torqx. In those days the d...